title: Exact and approximate area-proportional circular Venn and Euler diagrams.
abstract: Scientists conducting microarray and other experiments use circular Venn and Euler diagrams to analyze and illustrate their results. As one solution to this problem, this paper introduces a statistical model for fitting area-proportional Venn and Euler diagrams to observed data. The statistical model outlined in this paper includes a statistical loss function and a minimization procedure that enables formal estimation of the Venn/Euler area-proportional model for the first time. A significance test of the null hypothesis is computed for the solution. Residuals from the model are available for inspection. As a result, this algorithm can be used for both exploration and inference on real data sets. A Java program implementing this algorithm is available under the Mozilla Public License. An R function venneuler() is available as a package in CRAN and a plugin is available in Cytoscape.
authors.affiliation: Systat Software, Inc., 225 W Washington St., Suite 425, Chicago, IL 60606, USA. Leland.Wilkinson@systat.com
authors.forename: Leland
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wilkinson
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003196:Computer Graphics; D020407:Internet; D015233:Models, Statistical; D012984:Software